trivial people suffer? Or, for that matter, because great men suffer? Trivial people suffer trivially,
great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be regretted, because they are noble. Your
ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can be completely secured by non-
existence. I, on the other hand, have positive ideals: I admire Alcibiades, and the Emperor
Frederick II, and Napoleon. For the sake of such men, any misery is worth while. I appeal to You,
Lord, as the greatest of creative artists, do not let Your artistic impulses be curbed by the
degenerate fear-ridden maunderings of this wretched psychopath."
Buddha, who in the courts of Heaven has learnt all history since his death, and has mastered
science with delight in the knowledge and sorrow at the use to which men have put it, replies with
calm urbanity: "You are mistaken, Professor Nietzsche, in thinking my ideal a purely negative
one. True, it includes a negative element, the absence of suffering; but it has in addition quite as
much that is positive as is to be found in your doctrine. Though I have no special admiration for
Alcibiades and Napoleon, I, too, have my heroes: my successor Jesus, because he told men to love
their enemies; the men who discovered how to master the forces of nature and secure food with
less labour; the medical men who have shown how to diminish disease; the poets and artists and
musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine beatitude. Love and knowledge and delight in
beauty are not negations; they are enough to fill the lives of the greatest men that have ever lived."
"All the same," Nietzsche replies, "your world would be insipid. You should study Heraclitus,
whose works survive complete in the celestial library. Your love is compassion, which is elicited
by pain; your truth, if you are honest, is unpleasant, and only to be known through suffering; and
as to beauty, what is more beautiful than the tiger, who owes his splendour to his fierceness? No,
if the Lord should decide for your world, I fear we should all die of boredom."
"You might," Buddha replies, "because you love pain, and your love of life is a sham. But those
who really love life would be happy as no one can be happy in the world as it is."
For my part, I agree with Buddha as I have imagined him. But I do not know how to prove that he
is right by any argument such as can be used in a mathematical or a scientific question. I dislike